The delegation includes Sher Mohammad Stanakzai, the Taliban’s former deputy foreign minister and Shabudin Dilawari, a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, and Tayeb Agha, a close aide of Taliban leader Mullah Omar.

However, details for the establishment of a permanent office have still to be finalised.

Michael Semple, a former EU envoy to Kabul who was expelled in 2007 for talking to the Taliban, told BBC radio that the Taliban were “confused by the lack of coherence” between the Afghan government and the international community.

“There’s a risk that the Taliban sit there and think there’s some kind of divide-and-rule going on from the international side… and that actually no negotiated deal is possible and that they are far better off maintaining the coherence of their leadership which at the moment, frankly, looks rather more coherent and united than anything on either the Afghan government or international side,” he said.

There are worries that the Taliban are using the political office to raise funds, and as a ploy to buy time before foreign combat troops leave Afghanistan at the end of 2014.

There is also concern in the presidential palace in Kabul that those negotiations will be primarily focused on an exchange of prisoners between the US and the Taliban.

Five senior insurgents are being held at the US detention facility in Guantanamo Bay.

America wants the return of three of its citizens held by the Taliban and its affiliates.

They include a captured soldier, Specialist Bowe Bergdahl, and kidnapped US aid worker Warren Weinstein.

All are being held in the town of Miranshah in the troubled Pakistani province of North Waziristan.

Meanwhile, a senior member of Afghanistan’s High Peace Council remains in the hands of Taliban fighters in Nuristan, in the remote east of Afghanistan.

Shafiullah Shafi is considered an influential tribal elder – crucial in mediating between local Taliban commanders and fighters.

The Afghan government is hopeful that Pakistan will hand over two Taliban leaders from the east of the country, Mawli Kabir and Mawli Sadrazam, as a show of Pakistan’s support for the peace process.

The government also wants Pakistan to facilitate direct access to the Quetta Shura.

America’s special envoy to region, Marc Grossman, has been shuttling between key countries in the region.

In Kabul, he said the Taliban must renounce support for international terrorist groups and be prepared to engage with the government if peace talks were to get under way.

Western diplomats in Kabul have warned though that any eventual political settlement is years away, and that there is little prospect that fighting, which has claimed thousands of Afghan and foreign lives, will end anytime soon.